Keeping mum in clinical supervision: private thoughts and public judgements

Abstract

Context: The seemingly obvious claim that people prefer to keep mum about undesirable messages – termed ‘the MUM effect’ – was initially reported in the psychology literature in the 1970s. More recently, it has been discussed in contexts including performance appraisals and the reporting of unsuccessful projects in workplace settings, but only sparsely in educational ones. We wished to review the published literature on the MUM effect in order to understand the implications for clinical assessment. Methods: We performed a narrative literature review on the MUM effect and clustered findings together into three themes: those that describe what MUM behaviours look like, those that explore poten..